The approaches described in this section could be pursued but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
In network communications, amount of secure data flows is increasingly growing. Encryption of data traffic is typically used by content providers in attempt to protect privacy of end users. For this purpose, content providers offer a plurality of mechanisms for encryption of the content inside data packets. However, while satisfying privacy concerns of end users, the encryption of data traffic may create problems for network service providers. The network service providers may perform classification of the data traffic to understand which type of the data traffic is flowing over the network or with which application the data traffic is associated.
To classify the data traffic, network service providers often rely on analysis of the content of the data traffic. One of the techniques used by the network service providers for analysis of the data traffic is deep packet inspection. Using the deep packet inspection, the network service providers may analyze a payload of a data packet to determine the type of the data flow or an application category to which a particular data flow belongs. However, conventionally used data traffic analysis techniques may not be available for encrypted data traffic. Therefore, network service providers may have difficulties in analyzing and understanding secure data flows.